Life and Work Blog

We've been discussing the results of our survey of professional coaches and coaching students. Before we talked about the coach. Next we'll talk about marketing. Today we're talking about coaching sessions, fees, and customer impressions.

Coach Persona

We said this in the last post, but it's interesting to repeat. If we were to create a “coach persona” based on the top responses in the survey, the coach would be a professional certified coach whose main goal for 2018 is getting new clients. The coach has 1-5 clients per month and charges up to $50 per coaching session. The main obstacle in getting new clients is marketing.

The coach is willing to pay $51 to $100 per month on marketing, which is mostly online marketing. The coach doesn’t have a personal website. The word the coach most often wants others to use about his coaching services is “valuable.”

Coaching Clients Per Month

When we asked coaches how many clients they serve per month, 74% of coaches say they serve 1-5 clients per month, 14% serve 6-10, 5% serve 11-15, and 7% serve 16 or more clients per month. As we learned yesterday, their most popular goal for 2018 is getting more clients. Hopefully with intentional marketing efforts, coaches will see their average clients per month increase.

74% of coaches serve 1-5 clients per month.

Fee Per Coaching Session

Some say it's impolite to talk about money, but we did anyway. We asked coaches how much they charge in US dollars per individual coaching session. Here's what they said: 39% of coaches charge up to $50, 35% charge up to $100, 17% charge up to $200, and 9% charge more than $200 per coaching session.

74% of coaches charge $100 or less per individual coaching session.

Branding & Customer Impressions

We wanted to know what type of impression coaches wanted others to have of their coaching services, so we asked. The question was open-ended and respondents could enter any words they wanted. We then categorized the responses into similar terms, which created eight words.

The eight words that coaches want others to say about their services are:

valuable

caring

transformative

insightful

professional

engaging

practical

God-centered

Those are pretty awesome words! The most popular choice was "valuable" (23%), followed by "caring" (20%), and "transformative" (18%).

The most popular term coaches want others to use when describing their services is ‘valuable.’

Next post we'll explore the topic of coach marketing with habits, challenges, and how much coaches are willing to spend on marketing.

Chris Heinz inspires personal and professional growth to help people love life and work. He writes and speaks on employee engagement, self-awareness, strengths, and coaching. He's the Chief Human Resources Officer for EnergyCAP, Inc., where he created the ROSTER engagement program. Chris holds coaching certifications from Gallup and the International Coach Federation, and is a Learning Partner with Penn State. Chris' writing has been featured as "Best of the Week" by "Human Resources Today." He’s also the author of the “Made To Pray” book and prayer assessment, which helps people find their prayer strengths. Chris lives with his wife and three children in central PA. He blogs from www.ChrisHeinz.com.